Circumscribed disruption: FinTech narratives in central banking
Abstract
The proliferation of financial technologies has sparked debate about their capacity to disrupt the political, regulatory, and monetary status quo. In policy discourse, FinTech is often framed as a balance between supporting innovation and safeguarding financial stability. This article examines how central bankers and monetary authority officials construct this balance in public speeches. Using 789 FinTech-related speeches from the Bank for International Settlements archive, I qualitatively identify recurring thematic frames and classify sentences across the corpus using zero-shot classification with a DeBERTa-based model. The analysis finds convergence around a shared policy narrative of circumscribed disruption. FinTech is welcomed as a source of innovation, inclusion, competition, and growth, provided its effects remain compatible with existing frameworks of financial stability and regulatory oversight. Within this shared narrative, however, there is bounded divergence around politically exposed frames. Descriptive country-level models show that lower-income contexts more strongly emphasise inclusion and growth, while higher-income contexts emphasise innovation. The article contributes to central bank communication research by showing how monetary authorities narrate a complex, partly politicised issue in ways consistent with an epistemic community lens. Methodologically, it combines qualitative frame construction, zero-shot classification, and manual validation to study narrative variation at scale.
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Citation
Hernández Sánchez, A. (2026). Circumscribed disruption: FinTech narratives in central banking. New Political Economy, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2026.2737145